Related papers: Can robots mold soft plastic materials by shaping …

Autonomy for robots interacting with sand will enable a wide range of beneficial behaviors, from earth moving for construction and farming vehicles to navigating rough terrain for Mars rovers. The goal of this work is to shape sand into…

Human teams are able to easily perform collaborative manipulation tasks. However, for a robot and human to simultaneously manipulate an extended object is a difficult task using existing methods from the literature. Our approach in this…

Highly constrained manipulation tasks continue to be challenging for autonomous robots as they require high levels of precision, typically less than 1mm, which is often incompatible with what can be achieved by traditional perception…

Over the past few years, deep learning techniques have achieved tremendous success in many visual understanding tasks such as object detection, image segmentation, and caption generation. Despite this thriving in computer vision and natural…

We present a framework for solving long-horizon planning problems involving manipulation of rigid objects that operates directly from a point-cloud observation, i.e. without prior object models. Our method plans in the space of object…

We address the problem of executing tool-using manipulation skills in scenarios where the objects to be used may vary. We assume that point clouds of the tool and target object can be obtained, but no interpretation or further knowledge…

The term robot generally refers to a machine that looks and works in a way similar to a human. The modern industry is rapidly shifting from manual control of systems to automation, in order to increase productivity and to deliver quality…

In complex manipulation tasks, e.g., manipulation by pivoting, the motion of the object being manipulated has to satisfy path constraints that can change during the motion. Therefore, a single grasp may not be sufficient for the entire…

This paper addresses the problem of robotic cutting during disassembly of products for materials separation and recycling. Waste handling applications differ from milling in manufacturing processes, as they engender considerable variety and…

We introduce shape-changing swarm robots. A swarm of self-transformable robots can both individually and collectively change their configuration to display information, actuate objects, act as tangible controllers, visualize data, and…

This paper presents a strategy to guide a mobile ground robot equipped with a camera or depth sensor, in order to autonomously map the visible part of a bounded three-dimensional structure. We describe motion planning algorithms that…

Object grasping is an important ability required for various robot tasks. In particular, tasks that require precise force adjustments during operation, such as grasping an unknown object or using a grasped tool, are difficult for humans to…

Daily tasks require us to use our whole body to manipulate objects, for instance when our hands are unavailable. We consider the issue of providing humanoid robots with the ability to autonomously perform similar whole-body manipulation…

Dexterous multi-fingered hands can provide robots with the ability to flexibly perform a wide range of manipulation skills. However, many of the more complex behaviors are also notoriously difficult to control: Performing in-hand object…

Imitation learning of robot policies from few demonstrations is crucial in open-ended applications. We propose a new method, Interaction Warping, for learning SE(3) robotic manipulation policies from a single demonstration. We infer the 3D…

Intelligence lies not only in the brain (decision-making processes) but in the body (physical morphology). The morphology of robots can significantly influence how they interact with the physical world, crucial for manipulating objects in…

Dynamic motions are a key feature of robotic arms, enabling them to perform tasks quickly and efficiently. Soft continuum manipulators do not currently consider dynamic parameters when operating in task space. This shortcoming makes…

Human-robot collaboration requires the contactless estimation of the physical properties of containers manipulated by a person, for example while pouring content in a cup or moving a food box. Acoustic and visual signals can be used to…

Object manipulation actions represent an important share of the Activities of Daily Living (ADLs). In this work, we study how to enable service robots to use human multi-modal data to understand object manipulation actions, and how they can…

Human body motions can be captured as a high-dimensional continuous signal using motion sensor technologies. The resulting data can be surprisingly rich in information, even when captured from persons with limited mobility. In this work, we…